An increasing number of energy efficient appliances operate on direct current (DC) internally, offering the potential to use DC from renewable energy systems directly and avoiding the losses inherent in converting power to alternating current (AC) and back. This paper investigates that potential for net-metered residences with on-site photovoltaics (PV) by modeling the net power draw of the ‘direct-DC house’ with respect to today’s typical configuration, assuming identical DC-internal loads. Power draws were modeled for houses in 14 U.S. cities, using hourly, simulated PV-system output and residential loads. The latter were adjusted to reflect a 33% load reduction, representative of the most efficient DC-internal technology, based on an analysis of 32 electricity end-uses. The model tested the effect of climate, electric vehicle (EV) loads, electricity storage, and load shifting on electricity savings; a sensitivity analysis was conducted to determine how future changes in the efficiencies of power system components might affect savings potential. Based on this work, we estimate that net-metered PV residences could save 5% of their total electricity load for houses without storage and 14% for houses with storage. Based on residential PV penetration projections for year 2035 obtained from the National Energy Modeling System (2.7% for the …

Air-cooled binary plants are designed to provide a specified level of power production at a particular air temperature. Nominally this air temperature is the annual mean or average air temperature for the plant location. This study investigates the effect that changing the design air temperature has on power generation for an air-cooled binary plant producing power from a resource with a declining production fluid temperature and fluctuating ambient temperatures. This analysis was performed for plants operating both with and without a geothermal fluid outlet temperature limit. Aspen Plus process simulation software was used to develop optimal air-cooled binary plant designs for specific ambient temperatures as well as to rate the performance of the plant designs at off-design operating conditions. Results include calculation of annual and plant lifetime power generation as well as evaluation of plant operating characteristics, such as improved power generation capabilities during summer months when electric power prices are at peak levels.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has been conducting research to investigate the feasibility of producing mixed alcohols from biomass-derived synthesis gas (syngas). In recent years, this research has primarily involved the further development of catalysts containing rhodium and manganese based on the results of earlier catalyst screening tests. Research during FY 2011 continued to examine the performance of RhMn catalysts on alternative supports including selected zeolite, silica, and carbon supports. Catalyst optimization continued using both the Davisil 645 and Merck Grade 7734 silica supports. Research also was initiated in FY 2011, using the both Davisil 645 silica and Hyperion CS-02C-063 carbon supports, to evaluate the potential for further improving catalyst performance, through the addition of one or two additional metals as promoters to the catalysts containing Rh, Mn, and Ir.

Since 2006, China has set goals of reducing energy intensity, emissions, and pollutants in multiple guidelines and in the Five Year Plans. Various strategies and measures have then been taken to improve the energy efficiency in all sectors and to reduce pollutants. Since controlling energy, CO{sub 2} emissions, and pollutants falls under the jurisdiction of different government agencies in China, many strategies are being implemented to fulfill only one of these objectives. Co-controls or integrated measures could simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and criteria air pollutant emissions. The targets could be met in a more cost effective manner if the integrated measures can be identified and prioritized. This report provides analysis and insights regarding how these targets could be met via co-control measures focusing on both CO{sub 2} and SO{sub 2} emissions in the cement, iron &steel, and power sectors to 2030 in China. An integrated national energy and emission model was developed in order to establish a baseline scenario that was used to assess the impact of actions already taken by the Chinese government as well as planned and expected actions. In addition, CO{sub 2} mitigation scenarios and SO{sub 2} control scenarios were also established to evaluate the …

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A new pulsed Laval nozzle apparatus with vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) synchrotron photoionization quadrupole mass spectrometry is constructed to study low-temperature radicalneutralchemical reactions of importance for modeling the atmosphere of Titan and the outer planets. A design for the sampling geometry of a pulsed Laval nozzle expansion has beendeveloped that operates successfully for the determination of rate coefficients by time-resolved mass spectrometry. The new concept employs airfoil sampling of the collimated expansion withexcellent sampling throughput. Time-resolved profiles of the high Mach number gas flow obtained by photoionization signals show that perturbation of the collimated expansion by theairfoil is negligible. The reaction of C2H with C2H2 is studied at 70 K as a proof-of-principle result for both low-temperature rate coefficient measurements and product identification basedon the photoionization spectrum of the reaction product versus VUV photon energy. This approach can be used to provide new insights into reaction mechanisms occurring at kinetic ratesclose to the collision-determined limit.

U.S. and global demand for hydrogen is large and growing for use in the production of chemicals, materials, foods, pharmaceuticals, and fuels (including some low-carbon biofuels). Conventional hydrogen production technologies are expensive, have sizeable space requirements, and are large carbon dioxide emitters. A novel sorbent-based hydrogen production technology is being developed and advanced toward field demonstration that promises smaller size, greater efficiency, lower costs, and reduced to no net carbon dioxide emissions compared to conventional hydrogen production technology. Development efforts at the pilot scale have addressed materials compatibility, hot-gas filtration, and high-temperature solids transport and metering, among other issues, and have provided the basis for a preliminary process design with associated economics. The process was able to achieve a 93% hydrogen purity on a purge gasfree basis directly out of the pilot unit prior to downstream purification.

Effect of Mixed Working Fluid Composition on Binary Cycle Condenser Heat Transfer Coefficients Dan Wendt, Greg Mines Idaho National Laboratory The use of mixed working fluids in binary power plants can provide significant increases in plant performance, provided the heat exchangers are designed to take advantage of these fluids non-isothermal phase changes. In the 1980's testing was conducted at DOE's Heat Cycle Research Facility (HCRF) where mixtures of different compositions were vaporized at supercritical pressures and then condensed. This testing had focused on using the data collected to verify that Heat Transfer Research Incorporated (HTRI) codes were suitable for the design of heat exchangers that could be used with mixtures. The HCRF data includes mixture compositions varying from 0% to 40% isopentane and condenser tube orientations of 15{sup o}, 60{sup o}, and 90{sup o} from horizontal. Testing was performed over a range of working fluid and cooling fluid conditions. Though the condenser used in this testing was water cooled, the working fluid condensation occurred on the tube-side of the heat exchanger. This tube-side condensation is analogous to that in an air-cooled condenser. Tube-side condensing heat transfer coefficient information gleaned from the HCRF testing is used in this study to assess …

The goal of this project is to develop and demonstrate enabling technologies that can empower homeowners to convert their homes into net-zero energy buildings in a cost-effective manner. The project objectives and expected outcomes are as follows: • To develop rapid and scalable building information collection and modeling technologies that can obtain and process “as-built” building information in an automated or semiautomated manner. • To identify low-cost measurements and develop low-cost virtual sensors that can monitor building operations in a plug-n-play and low-cost manner. • To integrate and demonstrate low-cost building information modeling (BIM) technologies. • To develop decision support tools which can empower building owners to perform energy auditing and retrofit analysis. • To develop and demonstrate low-cost automated diagnostics and optimal control technologies which can improve building energy efficiency in a continual manner.

The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) is a DOE Energy Innovation Hub for modeling and simulation of nuclear reactors. It brings together an exceptionally capable team from national labs, industry and academia that will apply existing modeling and simulation capabilities and develop advanced capabilities to create a usable environment for predictive simulation of light water reactors (LWRs). This environment, designated as the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA), will incorporate science-based models, state-of-the-art numerical methods, modern computational science and engineering practices, and uncertainty quantification (UQ) and validation against data from operating pressurized water reactors (PWRs). It will couple state-of-the-art fuel performance, neutronics, thermal-hydraulics (T-H), and structural models with existing tools for systems and safety analysis and will be designed for implementation on both today's leadership-class computers and the advanced architecture platforms now under development by the DOE. CASL focuses on a set of challenge problems such as CRUD induced power shift and localized corrosion, grid-to-rod fretting fuel failures, pellet clad interaction, fuel assembly distortion, etc. that encompass the key phenomena limiting the performance of PWRs. It is expected that much of the capability developed will be applicable to other types of reactors. CASL's mission is to …

Email overload, even after spam filtering, presents a serious productivity challenge for busy professionals and executives. One solution is automated prioritization of incoming emails to ensure the most important are read and processed quickly, while others are processed later as/if time permits in declining priority levels. This paper presents a study of machine learning approaches to email prioritization into discrete levels, comparing ordinal regression versus classier cascades. Given the ordinal nature of discrete email priority levels, SVM ordinal regression would be expected to perform well, but surprisingly a cascade of SVM classifiers significantly outperforms ordinal regression for email prioritization. In contrast, SVM regression performs well -- better than classifiers -- on selected UCI data sets. This unexpected performance inversion is analyzed and results are presented, providing core functionality for email prioritization systems.

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The most important factor in limiting the stability of dye-sensitized solar cells is the use of volatile liquid solvents in the electrolytes, which causes leakage during extended operation especially at elevated temperatures. This, together with the necessary complex sealing of the cells, seriously hampers the industrial-scale manufacturing and commercialization feasibilities of DSSCs. The objective of this program was to bring about a significant improvement in the performance and longevity of dye-based solar cells leading to commercialization. This had been studied in two ways first through development of low volatility solid, gel or liquid electrolytes, second through design and fabrication of TiO2 sculptured thin film electrodes.

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The workshop on opportunities for polarized He-3 in RHIC and EIC was targeted at finding practical ways of implementing and using polarized He-3 beams. Polarized He-3 beams will provide the unique opportunity for first measurements, i.e, to a full quark flavor separation measuring single spin asymmetries for p{sup +}, p{sup -} and p{sup 0} in hadron-hadron collisions. In electron ion collisions the combination of data recorded with polarized electron proton/He-3 beams allows to determine the quark flavor separated helicity and transverse momentum distributions. The workshop had sessions on polarized He-3 sources, the physics of colliding polarized He-3 beams, polarimetry, and beam acceleration in the AGS Booster, AGS, RHIC, and ELIC. The material presented at the workshop will allow making plans for the implementation of polarized He-3 beams in RHIC.

The technical analyses in support of U.S. energy conservation standards for residential appliances and commercial equipment have typically assumed that manufacturing costs and retail prices remain constant during the projected 30-year analysis period. There is, however, considerable evidence that this assumption does not reflect real market prices. Costs and prices generally fall in relation to cumulative production, a phenomenon known as experience and modeled by a fairly robust empirical experience curve. Using price data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and shipment data obtained as part of the standards analysis process, we present U.S. experience curves for room air conditioners, clothes dryers, central air conditioners, furnaces, and refrigerators and freezers. These allow us to develop more representative appliance price projections than the assumption-based approach of constant prices. These experience curves were incorporated into recent energy conservation standards for these products. The impact on the national modeling can be significant, often increasing the net present value of potential standard levels in the analysis. In some cases a previously cost-negative potential standard level demonstrates a benefit when incorporating experience. These results imply that past energy conservation standards analyses may have undervalued the economic benefits of potential standard levels.

The safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) provides the international community with credible assurance that a State is fulfilling its nonproliferation obligations. The IAEA draws such conclusions from the evaluation of all available information. Effective and cost-efficient IAEA safeguards at the facility level are, and will remain, an important element of this “State-level” approach. Efficiently used, the Safeguards by Design (SBD) methodologies , , , now being developed can contribute to effective and cost-efficient facility-level safeguards. The Facility Safeguardability Assessment (FSA) introduced here supports SBD in three areas. 1. It describes necessary interactions between the IAEA, the State regulator, and the owner / designer of a new or modified facility to determine where SBD efforts can be productively applied, 2. It presents a screening approach intended to identify potential safeguard issues for; a) design changes to existing facilities; b) new facilities similar to existing facilities with approved safeguards approaches, and c) new designs, 3. It identifies resources (the FSA toolkit), such as good practice guides, design guidance, and safeguardability evaluation methods that can be used by the owner/designer to develop solutions for potential safeguards issues during the interactions with the State regulator and IAEA. FSA presents a …

The FACETS (Framework Application for Core-Edge Transport Simulations) project of Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Program was aimed at providing a high-fidelity whole-tokamak modeling for the U.S. magnetic fusion energy program and ITER through coupling separate components for each of the core region, edge region, and wall, with realistic plasma particles and power sources and turbulent transport simulation. The project also aimed at developing advanced numerical algorithms, efficient implicit coupling methods, and software tools utilizing the leadership class computing facilities under Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR). The FACETS project was conducted by a multi-discipline, multi-institutional teams, the Lead PI was J.R. Cary (Tech-X Corp.). In the FACETS project, the Applied Plasma Theory Group at the MAE Department of UCSD developed the Wall and Plasma-Surface Interaction (WALLPSI) module, performed its validation against experimental data, and integrated it into the developed framework. WALLPSI is a one-dimensional, coarse grained, reaction/advection/diffusion code applied to each material boundary cell in the common modeling domain for a tokamak. It incorporates an advanced model for plasma particle transport and retention in the solid matter of plasma facing components, simulation of plasma heat power load handling, calculation of erosion/deposition, and simulation of synergistic effects in strong plasma-wall …

The long-term objective of this work is to develop a transformational energy production technology by insitu thermal treatment of a coal seam for the production of substitute natural gas (SNG) while leaving much of the coal’s carbon in the ground. This process converts coal to a high-efficiency, low-GHG emitting gas fuel. It holds the potential of providing environmentally acceptable access to previously unusable coal resources. This topical report discusses the development of experimental capabilities, the collection of available data, and the development of simulation tools to obtain process thermo-chemical and geo-thermal parameters in preparation for the eventual demonstration in a coal seam. It also includes experimental and modeling studies of CO{sub 2} sequestration. Efforts focused on: • Constructing a suite of three different coal pyrolysis reactors. These reactors offer the ability to gather heat transfer, mass transfer and kinetic data during coal pyrolysis under conditions that mimic in situ conditions (Subtask 6.1). • Studying the operational parameters for various underground thermal treatment processes for oil shale and coal and completing a design matrix analysis for the underground coal thermal treatment (UCTT). This analysis yielded recommendations for terms of targeted coal rank, well orientation, rubblization, presence of oxygen, temperature, pressure, and …

This note describes the design, fabrication and calibration of the NDCX-II capacitive beam position monitor.

The recent development on TEM work of irradiated RERTR fuels includes microstructural characterization of the irradiated U-10Mo/alloy-6061 monolithic fuel plate, the RERTR-7 U-7Mo/Al-2Si and U-7Mo/Al-5Si dispersion fuel plates. It is the first time that a TEM sample of an irradiated nuclear fuel was prepared using the focused-ion-beam (FIB) lift-out technical at the Idaho National Laboratory. Multiple FIB TEM samples were prepared from the areas of interest in a SEM sample. The characterization was carried out using a 200kV TEM with a LaB6 filament. The three dimensional orderings of nanometer-sized fission gas bubbles are observed in the crystalline region of the U-Mo fuel. The co-existence of bubble superlattice and dislocations is evident. Detailed microstructural information along with composition analysis is obtained. The results and their implication on the performance of these fuels are discussed.

The April 2011 DOE workshop, 'Computational Needs for the Next Generation Electric Grid', was the culmination of a year-long process to bring together some of the Nation's leading researchers and experts to identify computational challenges associated with the operation and planning of the electric power system. The attached papers provide a journey into these experts' insights, highlighting a class of mathematical and computational problems relevant for potential power systems research. While each paper defines a specific problem area, there were several recurrent themes. First, the breadth and depth of power system data has expanded tremendously over the past decade. This provides the potential for new control approaches and operator tools that can enhance system efficiencies and improve reliability. However, the large volume of data poses its own challenges, and could benefit from application of advances in computer networking and architecture, as well as data base structures. Second, the computational complexity of the underlying system problems is growing. Transmitting electricity from clean, domestic energy resources in remote regions to urban consumers, for example, requires broader, regional planning over multi-decade time horizons. Yet, it may also mean operational focus on local solutions and shorter timescales, as reactive power and system dynamics (including …

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Reductive biostimulation is currently being explored as a possible remediation strategy for uranium (U) contaminated groundwater, and is currently being investigated at a field site in Rifle, CO, USA. The long-term stability of the resulting U(IV) phases is a key component of the overall performance and depends upon a variety of factors, including rate and mechanism of reduction, mineral associations in the subsurface, and propensity for oxidation. To address these factors, several approaches were used to evaluate the redox sensitivity of U: measurement of the rate of oxidative dissolution of biogenic uraninite (UO{sub 2(s)}) deployed in groundwater at Rifle, characterization of a zone of natural bioreduction exhibiting relevant reduced mineral phases, and laboratory studies of the oxidative capacity of Fe(III) and reductive capacity of Fe(II) with regard to U(IV) and U(VI), respectively.